Industrial Retro in Long Island City

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The 27-story Harrison is rising from the site of a low-slung garage in Queens. The building’s casement-type windows, trimmed in cast stone, were designed to blend in with former manufacturing facilities nearby.CreditVR Global

The Suna family, which helped set the stage for the revival of Long Island City, Queens, in the 1980s by developing movie-production facilities in a hollowed-out industrial area, is hoping for a different kind of hit with its newest creation, a condominium.

Called the Harrison, the 120-unit, 27-story red-brick-faced tower, at 27-21 44th Drive near Jackson Avenue, is rising from the site of a low-slung garage in the Court Square area.

The new high-rise will help redefine the skyline, but the neighborhood is already used to reinvention.

In 1981, Harry Suna bought a bakery under the Queensboro Bridge, about a half-dozen blocks from the condo site, and converted it to Silvercup Studios, whose first production was a television commercial for Cool Whip, the dessert topping.

Then, in 1998, the company, which today is run by Harry’s sons Alan and Stuart, bought a nearby I-beam manufacturing plant and turned it into studios, too.

According to Alan Suna, the chief executive of Silvercup, the investments led to the repopulation of a district that had become emptied out and seedy.

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THE HARRISON · 27-21 44th Drive · Starts at $495,000CreditVR Global

“We added a lot of bodies — bodies that were coming in and out and not just sitting in an office all day,” said Mr. Suna, who is also a principal of Silvercup Properties, the division of the company responsible for the Harrison and other residential projects.

The developer of the Harrison — the name of the building is a play on “Harry’s Sons”— also seems to be trying to take the area in a new direction.

Instead of the steel-and-glass facades popular on condominiums and rental buildings across Long Island City, the Harrison will have a red brick exterior. Its casement-type windows, trimmed in cast stone, echo nearby former manufacturing facilities.

“It’s a return to something that’s less aggressive visually and more urbanistic,” said David E. Gross, a founding principal of GF55 Partners, the architecture firm that designed the condo.

The developer always sought to honor the area’s industrial roots, initially planning to call the condo the Edison, in homage to the products made by the Eagle Electric Manufacturing Company, which had a large footprint across Long Island City, said Eric Benaim, the founder and chief executive of Modern Spaces, the brokerage handling sales.

But the Hotel Edison in Times Square asked Silvercup to discontinue the name to avoid confusing potential hotel guests, according to Mr. Suna, who dropped the moniker last year. (There is another condo called the Harrison, on West 76th Street in Manhattan, but Mr. Suna said he had not heard from its management or condo board so far.)

The apartments in Silvercup’s building will range from studios, starting at around 465 square feet, to three-bedrooms, starting at around 1,260 square feet, plus six penthouses. Fifty-one of the units are two-bedrooms, according to the development team.

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The building will have 120 condominium units, ranging from studios to penthouses.CreditVR Global

Prices at the Harrison, which is expected to open next spring, start at $495,000 for studios and average about $1,300 a square foot, a rate somewhat steeper than existing inventory in surrounding Court Square, which averages $1,100 a square foot, according to Julie Zhang, an agent with the brokerage Charles Rutenberg who works in the neighborhood.

For decades, Ms. Zhang added, Court Square was known mostly as home to the Citicorp Building, the soaring office tower that opened in 1989. And “it was sort of desolate,” she said. “But it’s coming along.”

Other brokers pointed out that for years, most developments in the area were rentals developed by the Elghanayan family, a real estate dynasty that controls many tracts in Long Island City through the firms of Rockrose and TF Cornerstone.

While early forays by the Sunas into residential projects mostly involved affordable housing, Silvercup Properties did build a market-rate condominium in Long Island City. The 76-unit Industry, at 21-45 44th Drive, opened in 2011.

Silvercup Studios continues to host productions in its soundstages, including television series for HBO like “Divorce,” with Sarah Jessica Parker — who also starred in “Sex and the City,” shot there — and “Girls.”

In addition, Silvercup West, a long-planned mixed-use project along the East River, is moving forward. Its polluted site is expected to be cleaned up by the end of 2017, Mr. Suna said.

And branching out, the company last month officially opened Silvercup North, a soundstage in a former lighting warehouse in Port Morris, the Bronx, a gritty section that reminds Mr. Suna of the Long Island City of old. “We think the Bronx is the new land of opportunity,” he said.